Posted on Friday, December 17th, 2021 at 3:05 am Written by Arts Corps
I’ve been a proud supporter of Arts Corps since it was founded in 2000. To deepen my commitment to its teaching artists and youth, I recently joined its board of directors. I’m excited to invest my time and resources into a community that helps young people connect with art and with each other.
As a 16-year-old, I stumbled into a connection to art without realizing it. A door opened when I was exposed to the garage rock, punk rock, and outsider music of the ’80s. With no obvious ‘rules,’ I felt like music was something I could do. The confidence and excitement of finding my tribe and identifying a creative outlet was thrilling for me and for all of us playing together in the Seattle scene, showing up to each other’s shows and rooting for each other’s ships to sail.
The success of Seattle’s music’s community will always be because of our shared art and vision. And that is one of the biggest things I love about Arts Corps. Arts Corps is about building community, support, and encouragement to say — sing, dance, draw — from perspectives that feel right to you, find your voice, tribe, find folks that you can make mistakes in front of… that might love your mistakes. An individual doubles or even triples their personal power when they collaborate and play with others, as a musician or as a person in life.
All young people deserve access to art as a core part of their education.
That’s why I am matching all gifts made to Arts Corps by December 31, 2021, up to $20,000. I invite you to make a gift to Arts Corps today. With your support, we’ll be one step closer to Arts Corps’ vision of a world where barriers to arts education no longer exist and all young people can creatively lead the transformation of schools, neighborhoods, and beyond.
Posted on Friday, October 22nd, 2021 at 6:34 pm Written by Arts Corps
The True North Gear team at an Earth Day clean-up event earlier this year.
Why would a company that designs and sells protective fire gear sponsor Arts Corps year after year? The short answer is that they deeply value creativity, imagination, and risk-taking; core skills that Arts Corps cultivates in students through our arts integration and out-of-school time programs.
True North Gear’s origin story speaks to how intrinsic these values are in the company’s DNA. With a sewing machine from Goodwill and an idea for a new type of pack he wanted to create based on his outdoor experience, founder Alyx Fier launched his company in 1992 out of his garage. While working full-time as a carpenter, he spent six months teaching himself pack design, patterning, and prototyping on nights and weekends. With time and persistence and innovation, he was able to design and sew his own designs.
Fast forward 29 years and True North Gear is a multi-brand corporation with a global reach whose products save lives. As Fier proudly describes it: “Everything we make is either used to protect the life of the person using it, or they are using it to protect someone else’s life. That is so consequential and intrinsically meaningful.”
Their products range from chainsaw packs to radio harnesses to flame-resistant pants, and they have dealers across the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Even with their growth, they continue to be a family-owned company, located on Martin Luther King Jr. Way S, just a few miles from the garage where it all began.
When asked if arts education influenced his development as a young person, Fier unequivocally associated it with his success in business. He shared, “I’m living proof that studying and being engaged in the creative process as a student can provide the foundation for an intellectually and financially rewarding life. My college education focused on film, theater, music and audio engineering, none of which would seem obvious choices as a precursor to a successful business career as opposed to getting an MBA.”
Fier continues: “The common denominator of my studies is that they all involved the creative process and what I learned is understanding and appreciating that failure is an intrinsic and important part of success. Knowing that emboldened me to risk taking. You have an idea, you try it, it doesn’t work the way you expected, you learn from that experience and apply it to the next attempt. It’s only failure if you don’t learn anything and don’t then try again. Fear of ‘failure’ is what holds most people back from actually being successful.”
Arts Corps is so grateful to have corporate partners like True North Gear who value the importance of cultivating creativity, imagination, and risk-taking among youth. Thank you, True North Gear!
Posted on Saturday, August 7th, 2021 at 5:35 pm Written by Arts Corps
Mahlum Architects Staff
For those in the design community, it comes as no surprise that Arts Corps’ longest-running Festa sponsor is an architecture firm. Mahlum, a Seattle architecture firm established in 1938, has supported Arts Corps consistently since 2008. The value of arts education is not lost on those who spend their days designing built environments that foster a sense of safety, connection, and curiosity — the very same outcomes that Arts Corps’ teaching artists work to achieve with students in the classroom!
I recently had the opportunity to speak with Anne Schopf, a partner at Mahlum and longtime Arts Corps supporter. Drawing the connection between Mahlum’s work and Arts Corps’ mission, Anne described that arts education was profoundly formative for both her and her colleagues. She reflected: “I can’t imagine not having it. Many of us are all so committed to understanding art itself. If not art, what are we living for? We [Arts Corps and Mahlum] care about the same things. We’re just doing it in different ways.”
Equity and community are two values shared by Mahlum and Arts Corps, and a specific way that they play out at Mahlum is in the firm’s design process. They try to center those who don’t have a voice at the table, honoring the culture and traditions of the primary occupants of the space. For example, in preparation for the design of a new hospital in Nome, Alaska, Mahlum’s design team visited with elders, students, healthcare staff, and local villages to gain a deeper understanding of the values and challenges facing the region’s people. This practice integrated Nome’s rich local culture with the hospital’s ultimate design.
It was clear from my conversation with Anne that curiosity is a core component of an architect’s job. When asked what her favorite thing about working at Mahlum was, Anne responded, “I get to learn something new every day. Right now, I’m learning about autism. How wonderful is that? I get to learn about new ideas that I don’t touch, but I’m learning through the work we’re touching.”
This passion for learning is exactly what we work to nurture through our arts education programming at Arts Corps. My conversation with Anne clarified that we at Arts Corps share a commitment to spaces that cultivate learning and creativity with our friends at Mahlum.
Posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2021 at 6:35 pm Written by Arts Corps
Deborah Sepulveda
For the past several years, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center has supported Arts Corps as a sponsor for our annual Festa event. The Discovery Center is a free public space that takes visitors of all ages on an interactive journey, bringing the connections we share with others across the globe to life.
With a vision to educate, inspire, and motivate people to take action through storytelling, the Discovery Center is a key partner in Arts Corps’ work to revolutionize arts education by igniting the creative power of young people. In the words of Deborah Sepulveda, the Discovery Center’s Manager of Youth & Public Programs and long-time Arts Corps partner: “We believe our programs amplify powerful stories of our local community in order to foster inclusion and belonging, convene and connect people, share unheard stories, and highlight opportunities to act.”
Despite having to close its physical doors last spring, the Discovery Center has continued to provide powerful programming. Last March they kicked off a series of free, virtual lunchtime events called In Community We Flourish that highlight community organizations creating change every day. The upcoming series will be in partnership with the South Seattle Emerald and Civic Commons.
The Discovery Center shares Arts Corps’ commitment to youth leadership and prioritizing youth voice. Every year, the center hosts the annual Teen Action Fair, which provides youth with a platform to tell their stories of making a difference. As Deborah sees it, “Youth want to be involved, taken seriously and deserve to be heard. Young people have led the charge on some of the biggest shifts in social change and justice throughout history and we continue to learn from their ideas to change the world… take the time to listen to their questions, ideas and feedback and we will definitely have a better world.”
Arts Corps is grateful to have partners like Deborah and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center working with us to cultivate youth creativity and leadership. Their sponsorship helps bring us one step closer to our vision of a world where barriers to arts education no longer exist and all young people can creatively lead the transformation of schools, neighborhoods, and beyond.
Posted on Tuesday, March 2nd, 2021 at 8:22 pm Written by Arts Corps
I come from a high school that specializes in helping students to become self-reliant and learn skills through the student’s interests. This is often done by having students search for internships or be an apprentice. When I was a freshman in October of 2018 I had a vague interest in game development and was short on opportunities.
One day my advisor Steve announced a new opportunity being offered to Big Picture Students. He told us it was an arts program that taught audio, story writing, and virtual reality development. That last one felt like a wild card. I didn’t know much about virtual reality beyond a few brief appearances in online videos or tucked away in some corner of an arcade. No matter where I saw it, it always seemed out of reach like watching an owl perched on a tree. The fact that it was offered to youth out of all people in this high school made it feel like a one-time calling. But because of my lack of experience, I hesitated to raise my hand when Steve was handing out the tour sign-up sheets. I’m not sure what took me so long to finally raise my hand, but it would change my life forever.
Arts Corps is an arts education organization whose mission is to break educational boundaries and allow youth creative minds to use their art to influence the world through various programs. I joined the first LIT program in January of 2019. LIT specialized in teaching students how to use audio software, film equipment, and virtual reality tools to make their art with the help of specialized teaching artists. It was the first year of the program so some things fell a little off track sometimes, but overall it felt like an artist’s journey. It felt like the program was growing alongside you making it; it felt less like a training course and more like it was your program.
Each session, we’d have morning check-ins, and even though we didn’t always have much to say it helped establish great community vibes. I loved when we went into the larger parts of Seattle on our trips to art studios. Even though meeting people who work in the careers you see yourself in the future is always a motivating feeling, traversing the streets and buses made it feel like the kind of stories you’d tell your grandkids when talking about your career. I don’t get to be on foot in the bigger parts of Seattle that often so that’s what probably amplified the experience for me.
The first major VR project I worked on when joining LIT was a simple exploration experience where you could move across dream-like worlds, which is my way of saying nothing made sense or followed a theme. It was mostly me trying to get my footing with the technology but it helped that VR is totally badass.
The greatest memory I have of the program was the final presentation of my first year. I wasn’t too confident in my weird VR project. It was also a way later time to present than I was used to so I was ready to go to sleep. To make matters worse we had a lot of trouble getting our showcase equipment set up like finding out who’s headset even belonged to someone. We cycled through students each presenting what we’ve been working on for the past six months.
When my turn came I felt a strange calmness and pride flow in. Suddenly my project didn’t seem like a failure and I started to see with the smiles of the attendees that it was a success. Whereas once, I was some lonely kid in a computer lab, now was able to work on something most people don’t even know exists. It helped that the presentation room was literally a theater, the whole thing felt like a triumphant cinematic moment on film with lights shining on us.
I’m one of those people that beats themselves up a lot, but I always seek to improve myself. This was the first time in my life I felt like I’d made it. It started off a long chain of future successes and I realized that I could be an artist if I tried. Since then I’ve only felt my progress of self-discovery moving further.
Arts Corps has helped me find what being an artist can mean and the joy it can bring to people. They helped me get my first taste of what it’d be like to pursue my passions professionally. And it’s given me hope that more and more youth have access to their resources so the world doesn’t miss out on the creations of a young person’s mind before their creativity is limited through adulthood struggles.
I feel the least I can do is help out Arts Corps the best I can as a classroom assistant so that when I eventually become ready to join the games industry I will have helped make the Arts Corps better for youth than when I first joined LIT. So now I’m helping the LIT team with an upcoming week-long intensive. From April 12th – 16th we’ll be helping students from grades 10-12 learn about using immersive technology for storytelling and game development. Applications are due March 19, 2021. Apply here.
Posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2020 at 7:22 pm Written by Arts Corps
It is with a level of excitement and sadness that we write this goodbye letter to James Miles. We are very excited for James because we know that every move he makes allows others to see his shine. We are very sad for Arts Corps because that shine is no longer exclusively ours.
Arts Corps has been very fortunate to have had James’ leadership as Executive Director since 2017. He has led this growing organization from building and sustaining Seattle and Highline School district partnerships securing high quality arts education for youth in communities of color even during COVID. So you see, it was a mix of excitement and sadness when he announced his acceptance to join the team of Mentor Washington beginning on December 1, 2020.
James has brought a multitude of accomplishments as Arts Corps Executive Director. To try to capture them all is almost impossible but these are a few that we would like to thank him for:
Arts Corps continues to reach over 2,800 youths in South Seattle to South King County.
Increased technological arts learning through the development of Learning Immersive Technology (LIT) and Arts Liberation and Leadership Institute (ALLI).
Since 2017, increased our revenue to over 2.5M up until the pandemic hit.
Turned a well-planned usual live annual fundraiser, FESTA, to a Live Stream fundraiser produced in less than two weeks after a state shut down was announced, reaching new donors nationally and internationally.
Arts Corps is on all social media platforms, including consistent communication to our communities through online arts learning experiences delivered by our stellar teaching artists, monthly blog posts, and relentless advocacy for equitable arts education.
Led the creation of online, remote learning arts experiences for youth and community partners- check out the; led the development of art kits delivered to over 400 students.
Created more connectivity with staff through weekly “on fleek” meets and elevating the “hipness” and “dopeness” into the office.
James has succeeded in making the Arts Corps tagline, “Make Art Anyway” into a challenge that has been widely accepted by staff, youth, the community, and the board, over and over again. We thank him for the energy, enthusiasm, and momentum that allows Arts Corps to thrive even during the most trying of times. James will truly be missed and we wish him the very best in his future endeavors. With James’ departure, Carrie Siahpush, Arts Corps current Development Director, will serve as the Interim Executive Director. Carrie’s experience and deep knowledge of Arts Corps culture, great relationship with staff and board members, partners, long term stakeholders and donors would secure a seamless transition.
Stay tuned everyone. Arts Corps is thriving and doing great things. We invite you to join us in our celebrations and watch as we continue to serve youth and our community. It goes without saying, but even through these hard times, we invite you to sing, dance, paint, draw, print, just Make… Art…Anyway.
